Third Body: The In Betweenis a performing and visual art project by Teater Garasi, an artist-collective group based in Yogyakarta.The project is based on observations and studies on the idea and reality of the “third body and third space” in Indonesia. Through a series of researches and observations in some cities in Indonesia (Yogyakarta, Indramayu, Wonosari, Pati) this project intends to investigate the following premise:

Indonesian cultures are always in an “in-between situation” or perpetually in the state of transition. From pre-colonial to colonial, colonial to post-colonial, agrarian culture to industrial one, industrial to post-industrial, from rural culture and cosmology to the urban ones… Transition which is never completed, from an unfinished changing phase to another that demands hasty departure.

In a nutshell, the history of Indonesian culture is an “in-between” cultural history. A culture that is located between two or more cultural spaces: between the traditional and the modern, the original and the alien, the inside and the outside, the high brow and the low brow. It never (again?) stays and grows inside one cultural space that is specific and sharply different from another specific culture. It builds on a mix (and excess) of cultures. Its “body” is constructed from many different cultural layers.

Based on those premises this project determines to investigate and recreate corporeal and cultural realities which are created within the in-between situation and in the state of transition. In other words: reality, identity and hybrid body constructed from diverse cultural layers that are competing each other, appropriating each other but also collaborative. Layers which continuously change and shape realities in between.

Output of this project:

1. “Java’s Machine: Third Realms”, Installations and performances-in-video by Jompet Kuswidananto in collaboration with Yudi Ahmad Tajudin. Will be exhibited in Para/Site Gallery, Hongkong, November, 2010.